Viewing profile — ak_yo

I find that this guide unhelpfully conflates probability and inference in a few places. Probability theory on its own is interesting but not terribly useful without the infrastruct…

This is an interesting argument but I think it fails to coherently restate what it means for race to be socially constructed. Nobody is denying that genetic differences between peo…

Cool tutorial, but I'm not entirely sure what makes this ML -- aside from neural nets, this is more or less the material you'd encounter in a basic applied statistics or regression…

Experimental design and observational causal inference would be excellent skills to have. Especially if you’re working with people who are asking you “why” questions, ML is helpful…

Great guide! Another reason to be familiar with this stuff is for data science: splines in particular are really useful for fitting a linear predictor where you suspect some of the…

This is right -- plus lm() is faster! Although, from a statistical perspective, if you can't invert X'X, that should first make you think "I have data quality issues" (i.e. multico…

I'd encourage you to think of this from the perspective of the person who's fearing for their life. It's rational to assume that the likelihood of someone potentially harming you i…

That's totally fair -- and I appreciate that you're willing to engage seriously about these things! Your last point is well-taken. It may even be the case these days that the major…

I think it's completely fair to think that a lot of these thoughts are coming from a good place. But the people who are espousing these perspectives need to understand that there's…

I agree, we're making the same general point -- it does seem crazy to ask someone to "ensure they hold no offensive opinions". So why, for example, should the opinions of the perso…

I believe this evidence is consistent with my point that a robust (and perhaps growing!) network of campus conservatism exists. Specifically, this evidence could be explained by an…

From my perspective, I don't want to work in an environment where people are voicing their opinion that (e.g.) gay marriage is illegitimate or wrong. How am I supposed to work with…

You can definitely stop science. There's a reason we don't secretly infect populations with various diseases just to see what happens anymore.

I completely agree. The exchange seems to go like this: A: "I think black people are genetically inferior." B: "I think that's a bigoted thing to say that has historically caused a…

In what world are these opinions not voiced? I don't think this argument stands up to empirical scrutiny -- there's an incredibly robust network of vocally conservative student org…

I think you're exactly right. His argument is completely self-defeating: it's a perfect example of shutting down criticism on the basis of tone. He's just dismissing critique out o…

To be clear, I'm agnostic of the guy's motive -- I'm just genuinely puzzled how, if you spent most of your waking hours supporting AI startups and expanding the tech industry, you …

I don't quite get why this is written as if the author is a neutral observer of this phenomenon, when in reality he works extremely hard every day to make sure it happens.

This is an interesting perspective but it doesn't really mesh with my experience. If I had to describe the typical political sympathies of HN, it would be "somewhat right of center…

This problem has been a structural feature of the academic profession for a long time -- Max Weber famously wrote about it almost 100 years ago: http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/wp-cont…

To tag on to this: I'd argue that work and school are more engaging than video games. When was the last time you just stopped going to work because it wasn't fun? Having to do thes…

I'd be interested in reading evidence that supports a causal link between AAVE usage and segregation. To the best of my knowledge, no research has shown this to be the case, but I …

The figure in this article* is taken (without citation) from a 2012 article by sociologists Michael Rosenfeld and Reuben Thomas. (open-access preprint: https://web.stanford.edu/~mr…

If you like this, you might also like Max Weber's essay on bureaucracy: https://www.law.upenn.edu/institutes/cerl/conferences/ethics...

> P=0.05 is best interpreted as "There is a 95% chance that this data isn't pure noise". This is incorrect. A p-value is the probability of observing a value of the test statistic …